General remarks—Great Ridge Wood—Encounter with a roe-deer—A hare on a stump—A gamekeeper’s memory—Talk with a gipsy—A strange story of a hedgehog—A gipsy on memory—The shepherd’s feeling for animals—Anecdote of a shrew—Anecdote of an owl—Reflex effect of the gamekeeper’s calling—We remember best what we see emotionally
It will appear to some of my readers that the interesting facts about wild life, or rather about animal life, wild and domestic, gathered in my talks with the old shepherd, do not amount to much. If this is all there is to show after a long life spent out of doors, or all that is best worth preserving, it is a somewhat scanty harvest, they will say. To me it appears a somewhat abundant one. We field naturalists, who set down what we see and hear in a notebook, lest we forget it, do not always bear in mind that it is exceedingly rare for those who are not naturalists, whose senses and minds are occupied with other things, to come upon a new and interesting fact in animal life, or that these chance observations are quickly forgotten. This was strongly borne in upon me lately while staying in the village of Hindon in the neighbourhood of the Great Ridge Wood, which clothes the summit of the long high down overlooking the vale of the Wylye. It is an immense wood, mostly of scrub or dwarf oak, very dense in some parts, in others thin, with open, barren patches, and like a wild forest, covering altogether twelve or fourteen square miles—perhaps more. There are no houses near, and no people in it except a few gamekeepers: I spent long days in it without meeting a human being. It was a joy to me to find such a spot in England, so wild and solitary, and I was filled with pleasing anticipation of all the wild life I should see in such a place, especially after an experience I had on my second day in it. I was standing in an open glade when a cock-pheasant uttered a cry of alarm, and immediately afterwards, startled by the cry perhaps, a roe-deer rushed out of the close thicket of oak and holly in which it had been hiding, and ran past me at a very short distance, giving me a good sight of this shyest of the large wild animals still left to us. He looked very beautiful to me, in that mouse-coloured coat which makes him invisible in the deep shade in which he is accustomed to pass the daylight hours in hiding, as he fled across the green open space in the brilliant May sunshine. But he was only one, a chance visitor, a wanderer from wood to wood about the land; and he had been seen once, a month before my encounter with him, and ever since then the keepers had been watching and waiting for him, gun in hand, to send a charge of shot into his side.
That was the best and the only great thing I saw in the Great Ridge Wood, for the curse of the pheasant is on it as on all the woods and forests in Wiltshire, and all wild life considered injurious to the semi-domestic bird, from the sparrowhawk to the harrier and buzzard and goshawk, and from the little mousing weasel to the badger; and all the wild life that is only beautiful, or which delights us because of its wildness, from the squirrel to the roe-deer, must be included in the slaughter.
One very long summer day spent in roaming about in this endless wood, always on the watch, had for sole result, so far as anything out of the common goes, the spectacle of a hare sitting on a stump. The hare started up at a distance of over a hundred yards before me and rushed straight away at first, then turned, and ran on my left so as to get round to the side from which I had come. I stood still and watched him as he moved swiftly over the ground, seeing him not as a hare but as a dim brown object successively appearing, vanishing, and reappearing, behind and between the brown tree-trunks, until he had traced half a circle and was then suddenly lost to sight. Thinking that he had come to a stand I put my binocular on the spot where he had vanished, and saw him sitting on an old oak stump about thirty inches long. It was a round mossy stump, about eighteen inches in diameter, standing in a bed of brown dead leaves, with the rough brown trunks of other dwarf oak-trees on either side of it. The animal was sitting motionless, in profile, its ears erect, seeing me with one eye, and was like a carved figure of a hare set on a pedestal, and had a very striking appearance.
As I had never seen such a thing before I thought it was worth mentioning to a keeper I called to see at his lodge on my way back in the evening. It had been a blank day, I told him—a hare sitting on a stump being the only thing I could remember to tell him. “Well,” he said, “you’ve seen something I’ve never seen in all the years I’ve been in these woods. And yet, when you come to think of it, it’s just what one might expect a hare would do. The wood is full of old stumps, and it seems only natural a hare should jump on to one to get a better view of a man or animal at a distance among the trees. But I never saw it.”
What, then, had he seen worth remembering during his long hours in the wood on that day, or the day before, or on any day during the last thirty years since he had been policing that wood, I asked him. He answered that he had seen many strange things, but he was not now able to remember one to tell me! He said, further, that the only things he remembered were those that related to his business of guarding and rearing the birds; all other things he observed in animals, however remarkable they might seem to him at the moment, were things that didn’t matter and were quickly forgotten.
On the very next day I was out on the down with a gipsy, and we got talking about wild animals. He was a middle-aged man and a very perfect specimen of his race—not one of the blue-eyed and red or light-haired bastard gipsies, but dark as a Red Indian, with eyes like a hawk, and altogether a hawk-like being, lean, wiry, alert, a perfectly wild man in a tame, civilized land. The lean, mouse-coloured lurcher that followed at his heels was perfect too, in his way—man and dog appeared made for one another. When this man spoke of his life, spent in roaming about the country, of his very perfect health, and of his hatred of houses, the very atmosphere of any indoor place producing a suffocating and sickening effect on him, I envied him as I envy birds their wings and as I can never envy men who live in mansions. His was the wild, the real life, and it seemed to me that there was no other worth living.
“You know,” said he, in the course of our talk about wild animals, “we are very fond of hedgehogs—we like them better than rabbits.”
“Well, so do I,” was my remark. I am not quite sure that I do, but that is what I told him. “But now you talk of hedgehogs,” I said, “it’s funny to think that, common as the animal is, it has some queer habits I can’t find anything about from gamekeepers and others I’ve talked to on the subject, or from my own observation. Yet one would imagine that we know all there is to be known about the little beast; you’ll find his history in a hundred books—perhaps in five hundred. There’s one book about our British animals so big you’d hardly be able to lift its three volumes from the ground with all your strength, in which its author has raked together everything known about the hedgehog, but he doesn’t give me the information I want—just what I went to the book to find. Now here’s what a friend of mine once saw. He’s not a naturalist, nor a sportsman, nor a gamekeeper, and not a gipsy; he doesn’t observe animals or want to find out their ways; he is a writer, occupied day and night with his writing, sitting among books, yet he saw something which the naturalists and gamekeepers haven’t seen, so far as I know. He was going home one moonlight night by a footpath through the woods when he heard a very strange noise a little distance ahead, a low whistling sound, very sharp, like the continuous twittering of a little bird with a voice like a bat, or a shrew, only softer, more musical. He went on very cautiously, until he spied two hedgehogs standing on the path facing each other, with their noses almost or quite touching. He remained watching and listening to them for some moments, then tried to go a little nearer and they ran away.
“Now I’ve asked about a dozen gamekeepers if they ever saw such a thing, and all said they hadn’t; they never heard hedgehogs make that twittering sound, like a bird or a singing mouse; they had only heard them scream like a rabbit when in a trap. Now what do you say about it?”
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” said the gipsy. “I only know the hedgehog makes a little whistling sound when he first comes out at night; I believe it is a sort of call they have.”
“But no doubt,” I said, “you’ve seen other queer things in hedgehogs and in other little animals which I should like to hear.”
Yes, he had, first and last, seen a good many queer things both by day and night, in woods and other places, he replied, and then continued: “But you see it’s like this. We see something and say, ‘Now that’s a very curious thing!’ and then we forget all about it. You see, we don’t lay no store by such things; we ain’t scholards and don’t know nothing about what’s said in books. We see something and say That’s something we never saw before and never heard tell of, but maybe others have seen it and you can find it in the books. So that’s how ‘tis, but if I hadn’t forgotten them I could have told you a lot of queer things.”
That was all he could say, and few can say more. Caleb was one of the few who could, and one wonders why it was so, seeing that he was occupied with his own tasks in the fields and on the down where wild life is least abundant and varied, and that his opportunities were so few compared with those of the gamekeeper. It was, I take it, because he had sympathy for the creatures he observed, that their actions had stamped themselves on his memory, because he had seen them emotionally. We have seen how well he remembered the many sheep-dogs he had owned, how vividly their various characters are portrayed in his account of them. I have met with shepherds who had little to tell about the dogs they had possessed; they had regarded their dogs as useful servants and nothing more as long as they lived, and when dead they were forgotten. But Caleb had a feeling for his dogs which made it impossible for him to forget them or to recall them without that tenderness which accompanies the thought of vanished human friends. In a lesser degree he had something of this feeling for all animals, down even to the most minute and unconsidered. I recall here one of his anecdotes of a very small creature—a shrew, or over-runner, as he called it.
One day when out with his flock a sudden storm of rain caused him to seek for shelter in an old untrimmed hedge close by. He crept into the ditch, full of old dead leaves beneath the tangle of thorns and brambles, and setting his back against the bank he thrust his legs out, and as he did so was startled by an outburst of shrill little screams at his feet. Looking down he spied a shrew standing on the dead leaves close to his boot, screaming with all its might, its long thin snout pointed upwards and its mouth wide open; and just above it, two or three inches perhaps, hovered a small brown butterfly. There for a few moments it continued hovering while the shrew continued screaming; then the butterfly flitted away and the shrew disappeared among the dead leaves.
Caleb laughed (a rare thing with him) when he narrated this little incident, then remarked: “The over-runner was a-crying ‘cause he couldn’t catch that leetel butterfly.”
The shepherd’s inference was wrong; he did not know—few do—that the shrew has the singular habit, when surprised on the surface and in danger, of remaining motionless and uttering shrill cries. His foot, set down close to it, had set it screaming; the small butterfly, no doubt disturbed at the same moment, was there by chance. I recall here another little story he related of a bird—a long-eared owl.
One summer there was a great drought, and the rooks, unable to get their usual food from the hard, sun-baked pasture-lands, attacked the roots and would have pretty well destroyed them if the farmer had not protected his swedes by driving in stakes and running cotton-thread and twine from stake to stake all over the field. This kept them off, just as thread keeps the chaffinches from the seed-beds in small gardens, and as it keeps the sparrows from the crocuses on lawn and ornamental grounds. One day Caleb caught sight of an odd-looking, brownish-grey object out in the middle of the turnip-field, and as he looked it rose up two or three feet into the air, then dropped back again, and this curious movement was repeated at intervals of two or three minutes until he went to see what the thing was. It turned out to be a long-eared owl, with its foot accidentally caught by a slack thread, which allowed the bird to rise a couple of feet into the air; but every such attempt to escape ended in its being pulled back to the ground again. It was so excessively lean, so weightless in his hand, when he took it up after disengaging its foot, that he thought it must have been captive for the space of two or three days. The wonder was that it had kept alive during those long midsummer days of intolerable heat out there in the middle of the burning field. Yet it was in very fine feather and beautiful to look at with its long, black ear-tufts and round, orange-yellow eyes, which would never lose their fiery lustre until glazed in death. Caleb’s first thought on seeing it closely was that it would have been a prize to anyone who liked to have a handsome bird stuffed in a glass case. Then raising it over his head he allowed it to fly, whereupon it flew off a distance of a dozen or fifteen yards and pitched among the turnips, after which it ran a little space and rose again with labour, but soon recovering strength it flew away over the field and finally disappeared in the deep shade of the copse beyond.
In relating these things the voice, the manner, the expression in his eyes were more than the mere words, and displayed the feeling which had caused these little incidents to endure so long in his memory.
The gamekeeper cannot have this feeling: he may come to his task with the liveliest interest in, even with sympathy for, the wild creatures amidst which he will spend his life, but it is all soon lost. His business in the woods is to kill, and the reflex effect is to extinguish all interest in the living animal—in its life and mind. It would, indeed, be a wonderful thing if he could remember any singular action or appearance of an animal which he had witnessed before bringing his gun automatically to his shoulder.